But a self sustaining civilization on Mars? I’m skeptical. Yes, it’s physically possible. And spacex seems to be heading in the right direction. But the sheer difficulty of the problem I think is sometimes understated.
Elon’s rough estimates on what it’ll take to create a self sustaining civilization vary from interview to interview. One quote:
“Roughly 800 to 1000 per year. That’s about what’s needed over ten years to create the fleet to build a self-sustaining city on Mars”
More than 3 launches per day for 10 years? That’s where the impossibility of it all starts to seep in.
Many seemingly unsolvable problems also arise. Where does the money come from? How will we make the Martian surface habitable? Even if getting launch costs down to 2 million as Musk stated once is possible (hard to believe, Falcon 9 is nowhere near that today), the amount of peripheral costs (maintenance, staffing, logistics, training, the list goes on) is extraordinary.
I’m pretty sure they’ll get to mars in the next 10 years. And they even have a good shot and doing that multiple times. But based on the sheer amount of payload that needs to get to Mars, it seems like a mission that will exceed the lifetime of SpaceX.